


Piecemeal Necrosis

by pinstripedJackalope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blind Sollux Captor, Body Horror, Dream Bubbles, Self Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 10:43:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1741838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the dream bubbles, Eridan Ampora isn't doing so hot.  He's tired, and he's been looking for the one person he wants to talk to for ages now.  Fuck his hot life, he's done looking.  He'll just lie here until something better comes along.</p><p>Strange that something better turns out to be a blind asshole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piecemeal Necrosis

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [so many walking dead: eridan & the psiionic, dreambubble](https://archiveofourown.org/works/429433) by [coldhope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope). 



> This is a little bit (or maybe a lot) based on that fic, a little hurt/comfort thing between Eridan and Psii in the dream bubbles.
> 
> Which I recommend if you have Eridan feels. Or psii feels. Or just feels in general.

Your name is Eridan Ampora, and you think you’ll just stay where you are for a while because hot damn how can being dead hurt this much?  With the endless gaping wound between your upper half and your bottom half, the agony of getting internal bits caught where they really shouldn’t be, and the terrible claws digging into your guts that have nothing to do with being cut in half and everything to do with hating yourself, you have finally reached the point where you might just give up.  You are tired of fighting the pickled remains of your body.  Fuck the eternal necrosis of the dreambubbles.  You have better things to be doing.

Things like lying on your back, glaring at nothing.

You have been lying on the ground for some time now, just letting the dream bubbles wash over you as they have this tendency to do.  You keep drifting in and out of Wrath and Angels, fuck your memory, but you find that if you block it out for long enough you eventually drift into the other bubbles passing by.  You don't care that sometimes people look down at you sadly, don't give a fuck that sometimes versions of people you hate kick at your busted hips.  If you could care less about anything, you'd probably disappear.

You’d put yourself together for a while, after a push from someone you ran into, but it took so much effort to keep the broken bits of your spine aligned and you kept losing little loops of intestine and you just got so frustrated that after a while you’d let yourself have a break.  It wasn’t as if you didn’t have an eternity to look for her--you were both dead, after all, and you’ve never been good at apologies anyway.  When she was your moirail, that was one of the things she was always nagging you about.  ‘Apologize to Vriska, she was obviously upset by what you said!’ ‘Just tell Kanaya that you’re shore-y, silly!  She’ll start talking to you again, she doesn’t HATE you!’ ‘If he snapped at you like that, it was for a reason!  Go apologize to him and make up!’  You used to hate it.  Now, you think you’d do anything just to hear one little fish pun.

Just not struggle to hold the two halves of yourself together.  That’s a special kind of pain that you don’t want to try again.  You're done.

People come and go while you’re laying there, tapping out rhythms with your feet and staring at the changing sky.  Most of the time you don’t know them and you’re content to glare until they get the idea and scram.  Once you see Kanaya, and you’re so startled that you sit up on your elbows with a wince to watch her with wary eyes, but she only looks at you.  She didn’t go into a highblood rage, you remind yourself--she was perfectly justified with what she did to you.  She doesn’t come near you.  The next time you blink the bubble shifts, and she’s gone again, and you don’t know if you could have said the ‘s’ word if you’d had more time.  You don’t think you’ll ever find out.

After that you mostly just close your eyes and ignore everything.  You won’t admit it, but you suspect that you might be wallowing and you don’t know what to do about it.  There’s literally nobody to tell you how stupid you’re being, no one to tell you that you can do it.  Everything is complicated in a way that you don’t think you can straighten out.  You almost laugh about that.  It’s pretty laughable, considering that you can’t even straighten out your spine properly.  Ha.  Funny.

You’re somewhere lost in that thought when the temperature takes a dive around you.  For the first time in a long time you don’t feel grass or sand or ugly, broken feathers under your back and your calves--the floor is hard metal, and you crack your eyes to see frighteningly familiar gray walls in a silent formation around you.  You know this place, and as your lower half begins to bleed fresh on the floor you shiver a little.  You died in this place--you killed in this place.  You never thought you’d make it back to this godforsaken meteor, but here you are.  You wonder what pitiful fuck is dreaming about it.

Looking around, you spot a figure sprawled on the floor just a few feet from you.  He’s propped up on the wall, and you freeze, because shit, SHIT, you aren’t ready for this.

The good news is that he’s still blind (YOU blinded him) and there is a headset pulled down over his ears, so you don’t think he even knows you’re there.  You freeze anyway, begin to bleed faster in your sudden panic, and you try to think about what to do.  You could always just stay where you are until he wakes up--if he’s even asleep, you don’t know if you could tell if he died since his eyes are crusty black holes.  He no longer has occulars to turn white.  But maybe it's not your eyes that turn when you die, maybe your eye sockets just fill with white light, you have no idea how any of this even works…

While you’re fretting, your feet have been digging into the ground nervously, and you don’t realize how close your bottom half is to brushing against one of his splayed feet until it’s too late to stop it.  Your knee nudges his white shoe, and there’s smudges of purple all over the floor now, and you freeze all over again.

His face rises, tilts to the side like he’s listening.  After a moment he pulls down his headset, something akin to a smile caressing his bruised mouth.  You gape for a moment when you realize that he’s missing most of his teeth, but then he starts talking and confusion washes over you.

“It’s you.  I knew you’d come,” he says, and it isn’t just the words that have you reeling.  He isn’t lisping, why the fuck isn’t he lisping, did he tear out his teeth himself so that he could talk like a normal person?  You’re disturbed by the idea but you refuse to admit it--you’re nobility, he’s a slave, what do you care what he does to himself?  But he was your kismesis--he should never have been hurting himself, that was your job.

You swallow and close your mouth.  He probably doesn’t know who he’s really talking to.  He’s been waiting for Aradia, you assume.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he says.  His face is unreadable, but he’s twisting the headset in his lap.  The boring holes in his face look somewhere past your upper half--your bottom half is jittering just a little bit, but he can’t see it.  You wonder what he does see--what he senses.  “I haven’t been able to say it out loud, but… I guess I should.”

He still can’t pinpoint you in the hallway, you’ve made sure that the gurgling noises of your exposed insides are at a minimum.  Still, he tilts his head, as if he knows exactly where you are.  You wonder if maybe one of his voices is telling him your position, and you almost swallow, but a moment later he swivels his head again and you think that maybe he doesn’t know at all.

“I… I don’t hate you for what you did.”  His voice is quiet, less grating than you’ve ever heard it.  He sounds so extremely mellow that you want to give him a good slap so he’ll knock it off.  “I still kind of hate you for being, well, you, but… I understand what you did.  Sort of.”  A laugh bubbles up from his throat, and you clench your claws around the edges of your torn flesh so that you’ll stay quiet.  What is WRONG with him?  “It’s irrelevant.  What I really wanted to say was that I know how it feels to kill the person you love most.  Sucks for you that you chose to kill her like the monumental idiot you are, but it still hurts.”

That one gives you a punch through the exposed guts, a blow so pitch that you forget where you are for a moment.  Him, saying that he understands what YOU feel?  As if.  You are so thoroughly knocked off guard that you don’t realize when he shifts, drawing his feet under him and reaching outward, feeling the air for another body.  His reaching hands go right over your head--he’s expecting you to be sitting up at least, you figure, not lying flat on the ground, so he misses you by a long shot.  He’s listening as hard as he can, but you’re still so unsure of yourself that you forget to say anything in response.

Which was probably a mistake, because he pushes himself back against the wall with a low, “fuck,” and curls up on himself.  “You fucking asshole.”

You’re about to get real indignant at that when you realize that he’s not talking to you anymore, he’s talking to himself.  He thinks you left.  He thinks you’ve abandoned him.  ‘Fuck’ is right, you massive tool.  Now you just flounder, wishing that you knew what to say, wishing that the bubble would melt away already, wishing that you’d never appeared in the first place.  You’ve messed it up because you’re a coward, that’s why you got dead in the first place, you were a coward that wanted to run away to the winning side and you payed for that dearly.

“Stupid fucking asshole, you feel a draft in the fucking hallway and you think it’s him,” he says, and his voice stings.  “How many times are you going to talk to air, you stupid, STUPID fucking grub.  Augh, FUCK.”

You are hauling yourself up onto your elbows when what he’s saying finally gets through your exquisitely thick seadweller head.  He’s been doing this for ages--he’s been trying to talk to you for ages now, and you haven’t been there.  He’s berating himself because he wants to believe that every time he finds someone in his bubble it’s been YOU, and now that you’re finally here with him you don’t even have the courage to tell him.  You feel sick.  One foot taps on the floor in an anguished rhythm, and your face twists up into a scowl because you shouldn’t know that, you should have just told him from the start that you’re HERE.

His face is pinched, like he’s going to start crying right there on the cold floor.  Before you can do anything else he hooks two fingers into the soft, burnt flesh of one of his empty eye sockets, yanking downward.  You gasp, and your stomach--which is halfway flopping out onto the floor--drops.  He makes no sign that he’s noticed, because he’s dug his claws so far into the battered flesh that a thick sludge of yellow is beginning to pool in the back of his empty socket, dripping forward like grotesque tears.  He makes a noise like a sob, one broken fang catching on his bottom lip.  “Cry, you stupid fuck,” he says, and his breath hitches.  “Oh fuck, why can’t you CRY?  Why can’t you do anything?  Why are you still alive?  Fuck, FUCK.”

You thrust yourself up onto the flat plane of your incision, suddenly blinded by hatred, because he SHOULD NOT BE HURTING HIMSELF.  You are his kismesis, you are his rival, he should NEVER hurt himself in front of you.  It is your job to tear him apart and build him into a better person, and yet here you are, watching him falling into pieces.  What a sorry scrap of pitch you are, you think.  You can’t watch as the mockery of tears dribbles down his cheek.  With an incoherent growl, you grab his wrist.

The reaction is instantaneous.  He yanks back so fast that he’s pushed back into the far corner in the blink of an eye, his chest heaving, his head cocked, listening like he’s going to break something.  The headset lies abandoned on the tiled floor halfway down the hall--he’s managed to put a good twenty feet of distance between you, curling up into himself, his bloody fingers aimed loosely outward, defensive.

You swallow back the anger, and slowly open your mouth.  “Sol… fuck, Sol, I’m right here.  What’s wrong with you?”

He doesn’t answer, and you’re too far away to tell what emotions are running across his injured face, but he is definitely focused on you now.  He’s so trained on you that he winces when you grab for your ankle, shoving your lower half a few inches toward him.  You grimace.

“I’m comin' over, okay?” you say, and you think you’re finally beginning to get over the stupid wavering accent you had as a kid.  Fef always laughed at it, telling you that if you wanted to make friends you shouldn’t alienate them with your affected seadweller lilt.  Funny to think you had to die to escape the bounds of your endless stupidity.

The procession is quite something.  You haven’t really moved in a long time now, and you forgot to shove all your intestines back inside before you started, so you have to pause and fetch your filtration sponges from where they’re dragging on the ground.  You push your hips forward, then brace your hands and swing your upper body, then back to your hips and so forth until you are settled panting beside his headset.  You gently pick it up, wanting to raise it to your ears to hear what he was listening to earlier, probably just the computer reciting code for him like the fucking nerd he is, but you don’t quite have the resolve.  You settle the headset over your thigh instead, and prepare to keep going.  He hasn’t moved, but he’s listening, and you smile, a little embarrassed even though he can’t see.

If you focus hard enough, you can push your feet against the floor and scoot your bottom half along on it’s own so that you have both hands to gently prod your torso along.  The going is a little faster when you do that, and it’s only a few seconds more before you are pulling up beside him, leaning your ribcage against your hips and using one knee as an armrest.  You pick up the headset and reach for him, just able to clamp it down over his ears.  He winces.

The right side of his face is still soaked in mustardy blood, but in the time it’s taken you to get over to him a pair of goggles has appeared over his eyes, familiar and pink.  You wonder if he even knows, then realize that he must.  He’s a smart guy--if he was waiting for you all this time, of course he wouldn’t have been wearing Fef’s goggles, because knowing you you would have flown into a rage.  They’re back now because he’s afraid.  He wanted the protection, because he’s said his piece and he doesn’t know what you’re going to do.  He’s using the last thing he has of her to feel safe.

If that doesn’t break your spade, you don’t know what will.

“So… hey,” you say.  You aren’t sure if you should start with how you shouldn’t have blinded him, or the self-aware coward bit, or the fact that you still feel the pitchest of pitch for him.  You don’t know if he still feels the same--you don’t know if he ever did, really, because you think it was more of a game to him to see how badly he could piss you off.  You aren’t sure you were ever really matched at all, because you had to blast Ahab’s Crosshairs at it’s strongest setting just to match what he was at his weakest, and the only reason you ever bested him was because you broke the rules.

He stays quiet for a long time, but when you don’t do anything like claw him or start shouting, he relaxes a little bit.  Finally he raises one hand, the clean one, and asks hesitantly, “Can I…?”

You don’t know what he wants for a moment, but then you realize duh, he’s blind.  This is how he sees now.  “Sure,” you say hastily, pushing your torso off of your hips and holding your breath.  His fingers, calloused and stiff from years of lightning fast typing, brush your shoulder and grip your shirt, feeling across your chest and up your neck like fluttering spiders.  You swallow as he feels up your windpipe, imagining what it would feel like to have those fingers wrap around and hold tight.  It’s a fantasy you’ve had often since you met him, and usually it ends in you knocking him away and returning the favor, gaining the upper hand, but now you just push it away.  His touch doesn’t get any rougher.

Then he’s brushing your face, and you realize stupidly that you’re crying.  You don’t know what he’ll do about that, maybe he’ll just pull back and tell you to leave, maybe it’ll inspire the anger inside of him that you’ve known so well, maybe he’ll break down again and cry with you.  Maybe you don’t know him at all.  Fuck, you wish you understood him.

He just retreats a little, wiping the purple off on his shirt before reaching forward again, his fingers exploring your hair and your horns then dropping down to your shirt again.  He smooths out your scarf, traces the collar of your cape, which was neatly cut in half by Kanaya’s chainsaw.  You’ve since lost the bottom of it.  His palm glides down your shirt, hardly touching you, until he reaches the place where your body abruptly stops.

“I didn’t go looking for you after she killed you,” he says, and you don’t understand what his tone means at all.  You blink up at him, but he’s impassive, his empty eye sockets gazing somewhere above your head as he concentrates.  His fingers stretch out and he runs the flat of his hand parallel to the incision, barely brushing your insides, and now he has your blood on his hands as well.  “She did a good job of it,” he remarks.  You catch the ghost of a smirk.

“Damn right she did,” you say, huffing.  “Better than the lot of you did.  Just goes to show how someone truly pissed off will kill you properly.”

He laughs.  “I was unconscious, ED.  If I’d had wits about me I would have killed you just as well.”

That hurts, just a little bit.  “So I guess… by the end there, you weren’t feelin' very pitch for me, were you?  I pushed you into right up platonic murderous, didn’t I?”

He shrugs at that.  “It wasn’t here or there.  By the end we were both fighting losing battles like the idiots we are.  Though I gotta admit, you were still fucking hot.  Gamzee, on the other hand… there was an asshole I could murder.”

You frown, and he tells you all about how Karkat knocked out his teeth trying to save him from the murderclown, and he throws in enough annoying little prods at you that by the end of the story you feel hatred welling up inside you like you haven’t since you died.  He rubs you just the wrong way to make you want to put your legs back on again just to kick him in the ass.  He knows exactly what you’re feeling, the self-satisfied look on his face tells you.  The two of you start talking about something else, you don’t even know what you’re saying anymore, you’re just melting into the familiarity of his snide remarks.  You forgot how good it feels to hate him.

“Sol…” you say finally, cutting off whatever stupid taunt he’s flinging at you.  He snarls at you a little, his face flushing darker just like yours is.  You are so relieved, so fucking relieved that he still reciprocates, though you’ll never admit it aloud.  But if he hates you, then you know you have to bring up the blood on his face or you’re going to explode.

“What?” he says, his voice light and airy in mockery of your serious tone.

“Do you hate me?” you ask, blunt like you’ve never been before.  When you were alive you were so afraid of LOSING people, but now you understand.  You have to know, you have to be clear, because the way you really lose people is by neglecting to tell them that you want to be with them forever.

“Wow, I’m not even answering that, you manic pixie dream douche,” he laughs.  You relax just a little, but you’re still resolved.  You smack him on the arm, and he yelps, unable to see it coming.  “What the fuck?” he demands.

“That was to remind you that you don’t fuckin’ hurt yourself, you fuckin’ mutant,” you say.  “If I ever catch you doin’ that again I’m goin’ to rip you to pieces.  It’s _my_ job, understand?”

He tilts his head and smirks at you, tapping the lens of Fef’s goggles over the bloody hole where his claws dug in.  He turns a little, showing off the headset like he’s hearing a secret through the transmissions, and just when you resolve to give him a proper hatesnog because he is the most impertinent, annoying bastard you have EVER known, he grins for real and claps you on the shoulder.

“Gotta go, ED,” he says, and just like that the cold floor beneath you vanishes and you find yourself on Wrath and Angels, why does it always have to default to Wrath and Angels, fuck your miserable life.  He must have been woken up by something, and god do you hate him.

You struggle up onto your elbows, huffing through clenched teeth.  Your legs are lying a few feet away, as innocent as ever, as if they never had any intention at all of being one with you.  God but you want to rip Sollux Captor into little pieces, show him what it really feels like to die, make him feel pain like he’s never imagined and then remind him that he has to fight, that he can never stop fighting, that he is a GOD and he needs to act like one.  

You swallow hard, looking around you.  Now there’s two people you have to find, and fuck if you’re getting anywhere just lying there.  That’s enough of a break, you decide, once and for all.  You have had enough of this necrosis, the stagnation eating away at your insides.  You take this new resolve, and you begin to drag yourself toward your waist, ignoring the twinges of your intestines as they catch on the ground.  Fuck if you’re going to let that little nuisance stop you now.

You have a Captor ass to kick, a Peixes ass to kiss, and your own fucking ass to reattach to get you to them.


End file.
